Esther Berry, From Temple to Transnational: The ... - Helen Pynor
Esther Berry, From Temple to Transnational: The ... - Helen Pynor
Esther Berry, From Temple to Transnational: The ... - Helen Pynor
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Contents<br />
List of Figures 1<br />
Introduction: Bald Reproach: A Stake in the Critical Politics of Hair 6<br />
Chapter One: Borrowed Braids: Western Beauty in Its Putative Plaits<br />
<strong>The</strong> Global Hair Trade Going <strong>to</strong> Great Lengths 11<br />
Down the Backs of the Third World 19<br />
<strong>The</strong> Support of a Nation 20<br />
Blonde, A Legacy of Lightness 22<br />
Big Beautiful Burden 23<br />
A Trade in Invisible Tresses 27<br />
Chapter Two: Lifeless Living Locks: <strong>The</strong> Zombie Commodity<br />
‘Abjection Overruled’? 32<br />
<strong>The</strong> Zombie’s Phan<strong>to</strong>m Limbs 36<br />
Objects Come Subjects 43<br />
Happy Hybridity Unravelled 45<br />
Faulty Talismans 48<br />
Chapter Three: Split Ends: <strong>The</strong> Global Hair Trade’s Inadvertent Blunder<br />
<strong>The</strong> Cannibal’s Curls 53<br />
A Kink in Rapunzel’s Rope 56<br />
<strong>The</strong> Oiled Braid Not Quite Black 58<br />
Failed Follicles 60<br />
Resistance in the Roots 65<br />
Endnotes 68<br />
Bibliography 87
Chapter Two<br />
Lifeless Living Locks: <strong>The</strong> Zombie-Commodity<br />
In contemporary Western society the fantasy of au<strong>to</strong>nomous selfhood appears<br />
<strong>to</strong> prevail. 1 According <strong>to</strong> Nick Mansfield, the self is identified with the uniqueness and<br />
separateness of the individual body (Mansfield, 2000:82). However, as Haraway observes, ‘<strong>to</strong><br />
be One is an illusion’ (Haraway, 2004:35). <strong>The</strong> primary concept delineated in this chapter is<br />
abjection, with particular attention <strong>to</strong> the coiling <strong>to</strong>gether of, ambiguity and flux in life and<br />
death, cleanliness and dirt, beauty and horror in hair. I use these theoretical strands <strong>to</strong> avoid<br />
treating a critical politics of hair with a binary logic that bleaches out its nuances. This chapter<br />
engages with the ethics of the global hair trade through what I call the zombie-commodity:<br />
objects simultaneously dead and alive, like hair, marketable monstrous merchandise. It<br />
explores why hair extensions are zombie-like, in particular by describing hair’s liminality and<br />
its relationship <strong>to</strong> Kristeva’s work on abjection. It looks <strong>to</strong> how, despite their being aware of<br />
this zombie-commodity’s abject status, many consumers disavow such knowledge in order<br />
<strong>to</strong> achieve a happy hybridity, which, as explored in the following chapter, necessarily fails.<br />
While the commodification and parcellisation of human hair on the global marketplace<br />
reflects a struggle between the First and Third Worlds, its hybridisation might also compel bodily<br />
subversion. In other words, <strong>to</strong> consume the hair of the Other might contribute <strong>to</strong> reinscribing<br />
colonial boundaries, the First World’s hair-extended women playing out a narrative reminiscent<br />
of Rapunzel in which they climb <strong>to</strong>wards alterity. Up the West’s ivory <strong>to</strong>wer, this is a climb<br />
endured on borrowed braids. However, the excess that extensions represent – great lengths of hair,<br />
rope-like – might also be instrumental in creating a productive delinquency: rebellious bodies<br />
that challenge the limits of femininity. This chapter asks: Are human hair extensions solely a site<br />
of happy hybridity for their wearers, or do they also create monstrous bodies and both…or even<br />
more? If they do generate the latter, how do the global hair trade’s consumers use both cleansing<br />
rituals and the commodification of hair <strong>to</strong> mediate abjection? Indeed, where does (racial) hygiene<br />
and global capitalism fit in<strong>to</strong> Kristeva’s vision vis-à-vis the politics of (post)colonialised hair?<br />
‘Abjection Overruled’?<br />
Within a Kristevan framework, the abject is that which challenges the symbolic order<br />
by transgressing those boundaries that seem inherently contradic<strong>to</strong>ry. For example, in April<br />
2006, a series of ‘sculptures’ by contemporary Australian artist <strong>Helen</strong> <strong>Pynor</strong> brought hair’s<br />
ambiguity <strong>to</strong> the fore by using it <strong>to</strong> create shapes and garments – a pair of clasped hands, a<br />
32
man’s shirt – at once subject and object, both calcified and fluid. In an informal email I<br />
received from <strong>Pynor</strong>, she writes that she is ‘interested in the way in which hair traverses, or<br />
exists between…polarities’ 2 (<strong>Pynor</strong>, 2006, pers. comm.). Perhaps this is the reason that the<br />
works in this exhibition were displayed under the name ‘Breathing Shadows’, a title that,<br />
according <strong>to</strong> Jan Guy, suggests translucence, ‘[s]hadow and breath…[being] at times visceral,<br />
at times imperceptible. Such are the objects of…<strong>Pynor</strong>’ (Guy, 2006:n.p.). Two of these<br />
objects are life-size coats that hover motionless in the space that surrounds them; they are<br />
knit from single-stranded human hair sourced by the artist from a hair dealer in London who<br />
supplies his clients with hair from Spain, Eastern Europe, India and China 3 (<strong>Pynor</strong>, 2006,<br />
pers. comm.). <strong>Pynor</strong> calls the hanging coats Exhale (2006) (figure 18). Spectre-like they seem<br />
Figure 18: Exhale, <strong>Helen</strong> <strong>Pynor</strong> (2006)<br />
<strong>to</strong> vaporise before the viewer. <strong>The</strong>y<br />
are woven from black and auburn<br />
tresses that become a lush silvery<br />
grey at the base of their silhouettes,<br />
thus resembling ‘a cloud of steam’,<br />
‘the momentary out-breath of a life no<br />
longer here’ (‘<strong>Helen</strong> <strong>Pynor</strong>, Breathing<br />
Shadows’, 2006:n.p.) or a spread of<br />
cobwebs. Exhale illustrates hair’s<br />
composite qualities, as its two forms,<br />
hung from wire coat hangers (as<br />
insubstantial as the ‘bodies’ <strong>to</strong> which<br />
they are fastened), seem <strong>to</strong> be at once<br />
present and absent, embodied and<br />
disembodied, living and dead. When<br />
discussing her experience of viewing<br />
Exhale Guy recalls:<br />
[L]ike discarded teeth and bones, [they had] entered the realm of Kristeva’s Abject [sic]…<br />
repelling one’s desire <strong>to</strong> <strong>to</strong>uch yet compulsively attracting the same. This reminds me of the<br />
time I…strok[ed] the hair of my mother, as she laid not long dead – the hair sparse and softly<br />
damp with sweat (Guy, 2006:n.p.).<br />
33
<strong>The</strong> abject causes anxiety within the subject for this very reason: it signals the confusion of<br />
seemingly rigid borders, of things that cross lines, especially those that seem <strong>to</strong> belong <strong>to</strong><br />
both sides, ‘that blur and question the whole process of demarcation’ (Mansfield, 2000:83).<br />
Guy expresses this idea when her hand makes contact with the hair of her deceased mother:<br />
an affective response at the layering of body past and body present. Here, hair becomes the<br />
doppelganger of life and death, beads of sweat (evidence of persisting viscera) clinging <strong>to</strong> its<br />
dead and dying strands.<br />
For Kristeva, the social subject works hard at alienating the abject parts of itself that<br />
it finds disgusting (2000:83): ‘clean and proper’ bodies forever sickened by their own physical<br />
flows, bodily secretions and wastes (Kristeva, 1982:2, 3): urine, blood, sweat, tears, semen and<br />
now, due <strong>to</strong> globalisation, the flow of human hair. Perhaps this is a reason hair donors are kept<br />
anonymous, for example, the hair sellers-from the Hairwork website – nameless and faceless<br />
as illustrated in the previous chapter – so that the process of acquiring abject bodily flows and<br />
discarded body parts feels less personal, the identities behind the hair more easily detachable<br />
from their associations with monstrous and threatening life processes.<br />
Kristeva describes abjection as ‘a twisted braid’ (1982:1), the metaphor of a hairstyle<br />
standing in for the threading <strong>to</strong>gether of affects and thoughts, of body and ideology important <strong>to</strong><br />
a critical reading of transnationalised hair, itself an amalgam of multiple and unstable meanings.<br />
<strong>The</strong> ambiguity plaited throughout hair’s many narratives, the contradictions that it embodies,<br />
situates it within the realm of the abject, what Kristeva describes as being a ‘repulsive gift’<br />
bes<strong>to</strong>wed <strong>to</strong> the subject (1982:9). I am aware that Kristeva’s work on abjection has been picked<br />
up by a number of different disciplines. Due <strong>to</strong> the scope of this research, however, I will not<br />
directly address these varying discourses on the abject. Rather, I will hone in on its relationship<br />
<strong>to</strong> the corporeal, <strong>to</strong> constructions of purity and impurity, as well as <strong>to</strong> fears of defilement,<br />
contamination and filth.<br />
Perhaps, as Martin Jay suggests in ‘Abjection Overruled’, the abject’s unequivocal<br />
association with discourses of transgression helps <strong>to</strong> reinscribe the very dicho<strong>to</strong>mies that it<br />
seeks <strong>to</strong> explode (by virtue of its ambiguity): subversion exceeds order; carnality and affect<br />
outdo reason 4 (Jay, 1998:151, 154, 155, 156). I agree with Jay that the concept has the potential<br />
<strong>to</strong> be over-used and, therefore, rendered prosaic (1998:151), abjection dumbed down. I also<br />
agree with Jay that abjection can at times be romanticised, deemed adorably abject. Indeed,<br />
what part of the abject body could be more loveable than a lock of hair, Shirley <strong>Temple</strong>-<br />
like, full of spring and shine? Despite these arguments, I will consider how abjection can<br />
be a powerful theoretical <strong>to</strong>ol <strong>to</strong> use when describing the conceptual and bodily landscapes<br />
of human hair and its trade. For instance, if according <strong>to</strong> Jay, Kristeva ‘defines abjection<br />
in terms of mourning for an impossible, always already lost object’ (1998:152), then the<br />
concept might be useful when addressing hair extensions because they are unassimilable:<br />
34
after three <strong>to</strong> six months Great Lengths hair extensions fall out and must be replaced (Great<br />
Lengths, 2006). <strong>The</strong>y are obscured for their wearers. Abjection does not, however, provide<br />
an adequate ethical model for dealing with transnationalised tresses or othered bodies. For<br />
instance, <strong>to</strong> refer <strong>to</strong> Third World women ‘in the same terms used <strong>to</strong> [describe] bodily wastes<br />
may well contribute <strong>to</strong> the diminution of their dignity, [not]…enhance it’ (Jay, 1998:151). An<br />
alternative ethical framework <strong>to</strong> abjection will be considered in the following chapter.<br />
In ‘Too Traditional Once Again: Some Poststructuralists on the Aspirations of the<br />
Immigrant/Third World Female Subject’, Kalpana Ram questions hybridity, which she also<br />
argues builds ‘new hierarchies on the ruins of the old’ (1998:155). Ram suggests that, within<br />
postmodern discourse, those subjectivities that are deemed <strong>to</strong> be the most composite are valued<br />
more than those thought <strong>to</strong> be less hybrid. With regard <strong>to</strong> the hair trade this resonates because<br />
the more selectively amalgamated one’s extensions are, the more bodies they comprise, the<br />
more ‘royal’ they become. Also, as we will learn from Ulrich Beck in the final chapter, a subject<br />
able <strong>to</strong> move between a number of landscapes (here, a ‘geography’ of bodies) holds a privileged<br />
position as, in its hybridity, it has access <strong>to</strong> social and ‘cultural’ mobility.<br />
Ram speaks honestly about her ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ regarding what she<br />
calls ‘the romance of the hybrid’ (Ram, 1993:11, 12). Hybridity should not, however, be<br />
conflated with abjection. While both have the same potential <strong>to</strong> collapse false binaries, their<br />
ramifications are different because of the dissimilar contexts in which these terms operate:<br />
abjection is situated within psychoanalytic and on<strong>to</strong>logical frameworks, while hybridity is a<br />
term particularly associated with the work of Homi Bhabha. 5 It appears (not without its critics)<br />
mostly within postcolonial theory <strong>to</strong> designate the constant transformations of culture and<br />
identity. In other words, it is not about the mixture of two discrete categories but about the<br />
inability <strong>to</strong> designate or stabilise the discreteness of these imagined categories. When discussing<br />
‘cultural hybridisation’, Bhabha calls for the revival of discourse surrounding boundaries and<br />
their permeability (Bhabha, 1998:30). For him, hybridity opens up a space of negotiation for<br />
equivocal articulations of power 6 from cultures that are forever in between, their ‘containedness’<br />
impossible (1998:30, 37).<br />
While the abject and the hybrid are related in their emphasis on boundary breakdowns,<br />
they have distinct philosophic and political emphases. As such, rather than use hybridity and<br />
abjection interchangeably, I reflect on how, in many ways, when applied <strong>to</strong> hair, abjection does<br />
not come up a washed-out theory but highlights the way a curl, seemingly insignificant <strong>to</strong> the<br />
body’s material and discursive goings-on, might in fact condemn the happy hybridity of which<br />
theorists like Ram speak of with suspicion.<br />
According <strong>to</strong> Ram, hybridity ‘is the postcolonial equivalent of the fractured, split<br />
subject that commands centre-stage of Western theory…Thus a new flurry of interests…in<br />
35
the diasporic exiles. <strong>The</strong> half-castes, the Creoles – all extensions of the interest created by the<br />
decentring of the Western subject’ (Ram, 1993:12). <strong>The</strong> crux of Ram’s argument is that the<br />
decentred, dispersed subject championed by postmodern discourse operates under a trope of<br />
benevolent assimilation: all must be included in a ‘celebra<strong>to</strong>ry rhe<strong>to</strong>ric of difference, diversity,<br />
heterogeneity and localisms’ (1993:11) when, perhaps, this decentring and hybridity is not<br />
what the subject wishes <strong>to</strong> embody or celebrate. Thus, while hybridity seems <strong>to</strong> be inclusive<br />
based on its multifarious status, it can also encourage a universalising logic that excludes those<br />
deemed, in Jay’s terms, not <strong>to</strong> be subversive/transgressive enough. For example, regarding<br />
international feminism, a contentious issue is the deployment of the ‘upper-class hybrid female’ 7<br />
as emblematic of all women’s interests (Sharpe qtd. in Spivak, 2002:613). This is problematic<br />
because in privileging the voice of this primarily First World hybrid subject, one excludes<br />
the voices of the women who are at issue within many feminist arenas: Third World women<br />
‘collected for the occasion’ of First World feminist debate (Spivak, 2002:614). As above, the<br />
privileging of hybrid subjects and the glorifying of abject body parts and processes cannot be<br />
married. A dialogue between abjection and hybridity can, however, help <strong>to</strong> communicate the<br />
ways in which happy hybridity might be the response <strong>to</strong> abjection brought about by the hairy<br />
body, but not that they amount <strong>to</strong> the same thing.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Zombie’s Phan<strong>to</strong>m Limbs<br />
Although hair unceasingly provokes the work of culture (Obeyeskere, 1998:xii), and its trade<br />
involves a dialectical intermingling of ‘authenticity’ and artifice, 8 as a signifier of selfhood, it<br />
is seemingly ‘natural’. It is rooted in the body, itself associated with base materiality, sexuality,<br />
indulgence and dirt (Dyer, 1997:75), while also extending outward, away from the body and<br />
its sins. As Warner suggests, it maintains a ‘suspended corruptibility’ (Warner, 1994:373): it is<br />
between the sacred and the profane. Hair is organic but less subject <strong>to</strong> natural corruption than other<br />
body parts because ‘like a fossil, like a shell, it lasts’ (1994:372). In spite of its insubstantiality, it<br />
retains an imperviousness – an uncompromised resistance – that warrants it powerful symbolic<br />
meanings. It can be cut, curled or straightened with hot irons, singed, dyed with harsh chemicals,<br />
cajoled with combs, brushed and pulled in<strong>to</strong> submission and yet it does not bleed and, save at its<br />
roots, it feels no pain (1994:372). When a body perishes its hair survives. As its skin dehydrates<br />
and recedes, it gives the illusion that its follicles continue <strong>to</strong> grow. Hair thus becomes the flesh’s<br />
last claim <strong>to</strong> life; it becomes its last claim <strong>to</strong> flesh itself. Yet, as Warner contends, hair is ‘the<br />
least fleshy production of the flesh’ (1994:373); it eclipses death and decay, as it defies its burial<br />
and outgrows the scalp and skin in which it is embedded. Nevertheless, hair – a fetishised sign of<br />
36
femininity so commonly associated with life 9 – continues <strong>to</strong> be unequivocally bound up in the<br />
perishable flesh from which it grows.<br />
<strong>The</strong> latter point gives hair its zombie status, hair extensions’ own zombification<br />
beginning here in hair’s symbolic materiality. As something that is simultaneously living<br />
and dead, hair can feel unsettling; this was the desired effect of many early twentieth century<br />
pho<strong>to</strong>graphs 10 (figure 19). Identifying hair as tissue-like suspensions of sepulchral substance<br />
is an idea newly (and fervently) debated in the<br />
United Kingdom’s judicial arena. In April 2005,<br />
Michael Ross Smith of Dudley in the English<br />
Midlands cut off the hair of his ex-girlfriend,<br />
Michelle Tether, without her consent. Holding<br />
her down in his bedroom, Ross Smith used<br />
a pair of kitchen scissors <strong>to</strong> sever her long<br />
ponytail (Leonard: 2006:10). This act caused<br />
great controversy in the British High Courts.<br />
Two senior judges debated whether Ross<br />
Smith could be tried for grievous bodily harm.<br />
At issue here was whether hair is considered<br />
<strong>to</strong> be a valuable body part or a trivial bodily<br />
appendage and, most important for their<br />
purposes, whether it is dead or alive. It is, as we<br />
have just learned, both at once; it is, <strong>to</strong> revisit<br />
Greer’s description of hair, ‘a dead mane’ on<br />
a living form (Greer, 1971:61). <strong>The</strong> political,<br />
cultural and biological schema of human hair<br />
and its transnationalisation substantiate a fear<br />
of borderlessness. Perhaps this is why the Ross<br />
Smith case spanned almost an entire year 11 and<br />
was granted an appeal by the High Courts after<br />
initially being dismissed: 12 because hair is a slippery part of the body that evades categorisation, 13<br />
a body part turned commodity whose contradic<strong>to</strong>ry status and subsequent zombie ‘body’ situates<br />
it within the realm of the abject.<br />
Figure 19: Livig hair (early twentieth century)<br />
Rooted in a zombie on<strong>to</strong>logy, hair has the potential <strong>to</strong> be a zombie-commodity not<br />
only because while ‘it is in full possession of vitality’ (Warner, 1994:373), it is in fact lifeless,<br />
hair consisting as it does of many dead keratinised cells 14 (‘Hair’, 2004), but because, in<br />
37
Marxist terms, it cannot be reified. Here, I refer <strong>to</strong> Georg Lukács’ analysis of the Marxian<br />
definition of reification in which when social subjects are commodified under capitalism, namely,<br />
one’s labour (or in this context one’s hair), they becomes objects alienated from the self 15 (Marx<br />
1965:72). In this sense, the commodity becomes spectral: a ghost of the subjectivity it once<br />
had or was once a part of. In Lukács’ terms, therefore, each commodity takes on a ‘phan<strong>to</strong>m<br />
objectivity’ as it conceals ‘every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation [<strong>to</strong>] people’ 16<br />
(Lukács, 1968:83). Hair extensions make obvious the spectral emporia of commodity culture; in<br />
some case exploring them in this way states the obvious. Like phan<strong>to</strong>m limbs – extremities that<br />
feel pain even when they are no longer present – the absence of one’s extensions, as Giancroce<br />
stipulates, can be felt. However, human hair extensions cannot be phan<strong>to</strong>m goods because,<br />
as will be discussed in Chapter Three, the process of reification that separates the commodity<br />
from its original identity does not hold for these great lengths: the bodies and alterity of their<br />
seemingly absent ‘donors’ never fully gone, in keeping with the zombie metaphor, never<br />
completely dead.<br />
Hair has, his<strong>to</strong>rically, been made in<strong>to</strong><br />
talismans of mourning; for many cultures, it<br />
is a way of maintaining a relationship with<br />
the deceased 17 while also protecting the living<br />
from the (un)dead (Hallpike, 1987:156). In the<br />
West, hair was braided in<strong>to</strong> Vic<strong>to</strong>rian jewellery<br />
(Better<strong>to</strong>n, 1996:142), the living subject robed<br />
in remembrance. Indeed, many people keep<br />
their hair after it has been cut or save the severed<br />
locks of loved ones <strong>to</strong> preserve the memory of<br />
a body as it once was, hair liminal between past<br />
and present, enmeshed with time and identity<br />
like rings grown in<strong>to</strong> trees. <strong>The</strong>se talismans,<br />
like <strong>Pynor</strong>’s Breathing Shadows, possess the<br />
power and properties of the uncanny as they<br />
make the beholder’s flesh creep and crawl<br />
by both substituting and commemorating<br />
missing corporealities. In <strong>Pynor</strong>’s case, the<br />
hair of her sculptures might act as a living<br />
memorial, however crafted from dead Figure 20: Loop my Loop, <strong>Helen</strong> Chadwick (1991)<br />
38
‘material’, <strong>to</strong> her father who passed away during the making of Exhale in particular 18 (<strong>Pynor</strong>,<br />
2006, pers. comm.).<br />
In other contemporary artworks, such as in British artist <strong>Helen</strong> Chadwick’s work Loop<br />
my Loop 19 (1991) (figure 20), in which a gleaming pig’s intestine intertwines with locks of<br />
blonde hair in a braided embrace (Better<strong>to</strong>n, 1996:142), the slippage between living and dead<br />
contributes <strong>to</strong> hair’s zombie potential. <strong>The</strong> golden hair suggests a grotesque but gorgeous meeting<br />
of blonde beauty and its carnal reality: the corkscrewing of glamour and guts. <strong>The</strong> straddling<br />
of these boundaries reflects the very haecceity of hair itself. In Finnish artist <strong>Helen</strong>a Hietanen’s<br />
work <strong>to</strong>o, installations crafted from human hair seem both <strong>to</strong>uchable and yet repulsive <strong>to</strong> <strong>to</strong>uch.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y give the specta<strong>to</strong>r the opportunity <strong>to</strong> experience abjection in the same way that Kristeva<br />
argues the skin on the surface of warm milk causes an abject response in the subject who tries <strong>to</strong><br />
consume it (Kristeva, 1982:2-3): one gags and feels nauseated, unsure of whether it is solid or<br />
liquid or both (Mansfield, 2000:84). Unsettling and soberly redolent of the bodies from which<br />
they once came, tufts of hair quiver and undulate across Painting with Asian Blonde 20 (2002)<br />
and Spread 21 (1996) (figure 21), drawing from them the promises of monsters.<br />
Figure 21: Spread, <strong>Helen</strong>a Hietanen (2000)<br />
39
Why is it that one can easily be made <strong>to</strong> feel uncomfortable by hair in the ‘wrong’<br />
places, for example, in Meret Oppenheim’s Fur Teacup (1936) (figure 22)? Yet, when the very<br />
same hair from Hietanen’s installations appear on the heads of its consumers, it does not inspire<br />
repulsion or anxiety, rather it is accepted as ‘normal’, ‘natural’ and, in many instances, beautiful.<br />
One possible response would be <strong>to</strong> consider that this idea depends on what Mary Douglas<br />
refers <strong>to</strong> as ‘matter out of place’ (James qtd. in Douglas, 1969:164): the body’s waste, like hair<br />
clippings, is generally classified as dirty, 22 disconnected, ‘on<strong>to</strong>logically neutral’ 23 (Waldby and<br />
Mitchell, 2006:84).<br />
Figure 22: Fur Teacup, Meret Oppenheim (1936)<br />
For example, the room at Auschwitz filled with bales of hair cut from the heads<br />
of Holocaust victims is a space in which hair conjures up death (figures 23 and 24). As<br />
mentioned in the introduction, for many post-war Jewish communities, and for other persons<br />
<strong>to</strong>o, hair framed in this context can be said <strong>to</strong> signify non-regeneration. Whereas, bought<br />
hair circulates; it is seemingly part of ‘life’, animated by global bodily flows and exchanges.<br />
Although ‘circulation…does not carry with it the principle of self-renewal’ (Marx, 1973:254),<br />
40
the contract of purchasing extensions can seek <strong>to</strong> preserve life from death in the sense that hair<br />
severed from its donor body is saved from being waste and reanimated through its attachment<br />
<strong>to</strong> a new living form. As discussed in the following chapter, within a Derridean framework,<br />
this process of regenerating the body of the Other vis-à-vis bodily assimilation with another<br />
subjectivity necessarily fails.<br />
Figure 23: Bags of hair at Auschwitz<br />
Figure 24: Prisoners’ hair at Auschwitz<br />
41
Hair is an interesting zombie-commodity <strong>to</strong> untangle within this framework because,<br />
unlike a heart donated for transplant or oocytes sold for donor insemination, it can be perceived<br />
as being lifeless. To recapitulate Warner’s point, hair cannot feel pain (Warner, 1994:372), a<br />
sensation associated with the living body. According <strong>to</strong> George Fairburn, appearing for Ross<br />
Smith in court, hair may have importance from the point of view of vanity, and it might be<br />
something that helps <strong>to</strong> identify a person’s lifestyle and personality – ‘but that should not allow<br />
such importance <strong>to</strong> be attached <strong>to</strong> it in the way injury or pain [caused] <strong>to</strong> another part of the body<br />
might’ (Fairburn qtd. in As<strong>to</strong>n, 2006). Hair can therefore be read as more ethically purchasable<br />
because of what seems <strong>to</strong> be its more dominant objecthood. However, this commodity deemed<br />
dead does come alive as it breathes voluminousness, ‘strength’ and ‘body’ – ‘luscious’ life<br />
– in<strong>to</strong> the heads of its consumers (figure 25) (Great Lengths, 2006). This rhe<strong>to</strong>ric of hair as<br />
possessing a life force that is critical <strong>to</strong> one’s femininity also appeared in the Ross Smith case.<br />
In his final ruling, Justice Cresswell stated that ‘[t]o a woman, her hair is a vitally important part<br />
of her body. It has sheen and is lifelike’ (Armstrong, 2006). In some senses this is correct. As<br />
previously discussed, unlike the body, which itself eventually turns <strong>to</strong> bone and dust, hair evades<br />
putrification. Moreover, as a commodity, hair ‘is not one kind of thing rather than another, but<br />
one phase in the life of [a] thing’ (Appadurai, 1986:17), a ‘thing’ whose status shifts between<br />
being a dead object for sale and body part awaiting fleshy reanimation.<br />
Figure 25: Great Lengths International advertisement<br />
42
At this point, I would like <strong>to</strong> place the emphasis on the failure of saving the ‘life’ of<br />
extensions from their inevitable demise because, as previously mentioned, they unavoidably fall<br />
out. <strong>The</strong> discourse of replacement that ensues – buy more great lengths <strong>to</strong> mediate the absence<br />
of the old ones – can be read as a discourse of futile attempts at regenerating what is dead and<br />
dying. <strong>The</strong> intermingling of life and death at work in the very biology of human hair is also<br />
played out in its globalisation. As transnationalised tresses, it passes from one body <strong>to</strong> the next,<br />
finally disposed of so that, in its new context as waste, it takes on a zomibe presence through<br />
its literal and quasi-literal (dis)connection from the lives of both its producers and consumers.<br />
Hietanen’s piece, the room of hair at Auschwitz and discarded extensions all seem <strong>to</strong> be situated<br />
in proximity <strong>to</strong> the abject because they exist, in different ways, on the periphery of life worlds.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y challenge their specta<strong>to</strong>rs with the zombie prospect that hair and its extensions – dead<br />
tissue jettisoned from living flesh – can upset and abject when, disembodied, they teeter on the<br />
borders of ‘death infecting life’ (Kristeva, 1982:4).<br />
Hair extensions might also <strong>to</strong> some extent reverse this logic, the very abjection Kristeva<br />
refers <strong>to</strong> as bending <strong>to</strong>wards death 24 (1982:3) used <strong>to</strong> ‘infect’ the latter with vitality because,<br />
within Kristevan logic, that which threatens <strong>to</strong> destroy life also helps <strong>to</strong> define it (Creed,<br />
1993:9). <strong>The</strong> process of commoditisation, returned <strong>to</strong> at the end of this chapter, illustrates this<br />
point. Categorising that which is or is not a commodity can involve distinguishing between<br />
the realm of persons and that of objects, something that has become culturally axiomatic in<br />
the West (Kopy<strong>to</strong>ff, 1986:84); this, we have already learned from La<strong>to</strong>ur. I do not want my<br />
argument at the end of this chapter <strong>to</strong> be unduly pre-empted. However, I will note that part<br />
of the distinction between the zombie-commodity and the individual is also a differentiation<br />
between an apparently inanimate object for sale and a living subject for consumption. As such,<br />
if this object beats, bruises or bleeds, both it and its commoditisation take on a life of their<br />
own. <strong>The</strong>y are no longer ‘dead’ things, rather they are zombie-commodities that provoke moral<br />
controversy because societies place limitations on the commodification of certain ‘sacred<br />
objects’ associated with the living human form (Waldby and Mitchell, 20006:25-26). In short,<br />
they are contentious commodities because they uncover a discourse of cannibalism. I return <strong>to</strong><br />
this idea in Chapter Three.<br />
Objects Come Subjects<br />
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno La<strong>to</strong>ur argues that not only is ‘[o]ur fabric…<br />
no longer seamless’ (La<strong>to</strong>ur, 1993:7), but that, in fact, it never has been. I find La<strong>to</strong>ur’s<br />
work on hybridity suggestive for a critical analysis of transnationalised hair because,<br />
as with Derridean logic teased out in the following chapter, La<strong>to</strong>ur’s own theoretical<br />
mappings recognise the myriad ways in which the body is mediated by the alterity of its<br />
43
Others (Deutscher, 1998:17). <strong>The</strong> everydayness of hair and hair extensions as liminal is not such<br />
a radical idea. This is evident when hair is lived and experienced in settler colonial societies,<br />
sites of hybridity from the first moments of contact and colonisation 25 (Bhabha, 1998:29-30).<br />
Indeed, the very quality and texture of hair for many colonised persons became composite<br />
through the process of miscegenation. For example, Australia’s Assimilation Policy that, during<br />
the 1930s, aimed <strong>to</strong> ‘Breed out the Colour’ of its indigenous population with discourses of<br />
biological absorption. It was responsible for racist rhe<strong>to</strong>ric surrounding a perceived need <strong>to</strong><br />
‘develop the native race’ by slowly making them white (Cowlishaw, 1999:104). One such way<br />
<strong>to</strong> ‘develop’ the Other was through the gradual lightening of skin and straightening of hair, a<br />
genetic hybridisation of coloniser and colonised designed, ironically, <strong>to</strong> maintain the purity of<br />
white Australia (Moran, 2005:168). Thus, for La<strong>to</strong>ur, ‘we have never been modern’ (modernity<br />
being associated with a penchant for dualisms) 26 because we are always already confusing<br />
myriad boundaries (La<strong>to</strong>ur 1993:2, 4, 5), even in the very ‘quality’ of our curls.<br />
Applying La<strong>to</strong>ur’s logic <strong>to</strong> hair is useful regarding what he calls ‘quasi-objects’: ‘objects<br />
of external reality on the one hand, subjects of society on the other’ (1993:95). Although I wish<br />
<strong>to</strong> replace La<strong>to</strong>ur’s latter notion of a ‘subject of society’ with a ‘subject of the body’, I would<br />
still like <strong>to</strong> situate hair within the realm of quasi-objects: zombie-objects deceptively ‘dead’.<br />
Doing so provides the opportunity not <strong>to</strong> make an a priori separation between hair as an object<br />
outside of the body, and hair as inside of it or, in other words, as part of the subject. Rather,<br />
I want <strong>to</strong> allow hair <strong>to</strong> breathe life in<strong>to</strong> the theory that describes its illusory objectivity. Like<br />
<strong>Pynor</strong>’s artistry, in which hair is a testament <strong>to</strong> its own brittle materiality as well as <strong>to</strong> the<br />
intimate memory of the bodily shapes and subjectivities that it forms, in this thesis hair is given<br />
the opportunity <strong>to</strong> be neither object nor subject, but <strong>to</strong> Exhale as both. Hair might represent<br />
an interface between these two thresholds (subject and object), or it might exist beyond ‘the<br />
universe of people and the universe of objects’ (Kopy<strong>to</strong>ff, 1986:84, italics added). Ultimately,<br />
however, hair can be read as being quite literally both subject and object: 27 it grows from beneath<br />
the scalp’s surface and is therefore part of the subject, while also extending outward from the<br />
flesh such that it connects the bodily interior with the external world of objects. When hair itself<br />
becomes an object for sale it mediates the world of human subjects by becoming, however<br />
detachable, part of its wearer’s corporeality; it is (phan<strong>to</strong>m) object come (zombie) subject.<br />
Reading objects as though they are subjects might have contributed <strong>to</strong> recent<br />
controversy in the United States in which a number of orthodox Jewish women have been<br />
urged by rabbis not <strong>to</strong> wear wigs made of real hair and <strong>to</strong> opt for synthetic ones instead<br />
(Heilman, 2004). Potentially crafted from Indian temple hair, for orthodox Jews, such wigs<br />
represent idolatry because the hair comes from Hindu women whose spiritual practices,<br />
44
including the <strong>to</strong>nsuring of their sacred strands, might have involved the worship of idols<br />
(2004); in Judaism, idolatry is forbidden. Here, it seems that the wig, used in the Jewish faith<br />
<strong>to</strong> cover women’s hair in order <strong>to</strong> preserve their modesty (ironically with yet more hair), takes<br />
on the identities of its producers. Perhaps the problematic caused by a perceived infidelity <strong>to</strong><br />
Jewish doctrine, as in the Torah, that prohibits the derivation of benefit from any accessory,<br />
decoration or sacrifice <strong>to</strong> idol worship (2004), also involves anxieties around an object taking<br />
on the his<strong>to</strong>ry, religion and, therefore, the partial subjectivity of its original body, a commodity<br />
whose former ‘life’ is still partly alive. This object might cause anxiety for an orthodox Jewish<br />
consumer because it tangles up <strong>to</strong>o tightly the sacred and the profane. Within this context,<br />
transnationalised hair extensions truly are a ‘repulsive gift’ that its consumers might both desire<br />
and abhor. Alternatively, for many consumers, human hair products invite pleasure. This is why<br />
it is important <strong>to</strong> consider Jay’s and Ram’s earlier arguments, because the hair trade’s clientele<br />
might understand their extensions <strong>to</strong> be a zombie-commodity but romanticise the abjection that<br />
their new hair provokes. Beckham, for instance, seems <strong>to</strong> maintain a happy hybridity in her<br />
declaration of wearing ‘Russian cell-block H on [her] head’ (Beckham qtd. in ‘Posh’s Hair’,<br />
2004:13), an arguable response <strong>to</strong> the abjection she might experience were she <strong>to</strong> critically<br />
consider the ethics of her ‘intercorporeality’. 28<br />
Happy Hybridity Unravelled<br />
If, according <strong>to</strong> Haraway, ‘<strong>to</strong> be [O]ther is <strong>to</strong> be multiple’ (Haraway, 2004:35),<br />
has Beckham become a disparate subject? In a globalised climate that calls for fluidity and<br />
fragmentation, where does her body begin and end? Does her corporeal feel more coherent<br />
because it has been enhanced, extended, made whole, by the bodies of other women? Does she<br />
see her body as monstrous – a form that deviates, threatens and disrupts – like the body of 38-<br />
year-old Frenchwoman Isabelle Amiens, the world’s first recipient of a partial face transplant, 29<br />
who has opened up new and unfamiliar categories of corporeality? Visibly hybrid, Amiens is<br />
both (living) host body and (deceased) donor body at once (figure 26).<br />
Figure 26: Isabelle Dinoire (2005)<br />
Alternatively, might we compare<br />
Beckham <strong>to</strong> Cindy Jackson’s physique,<br />
which has undergone more than fifty<br />
plastic surgeries <strong>to</strong> remake it in the<br />
image of the Barbie Doll 30 (figure<br />
27). Visibly altered, Jackson is both<br />
‘authentic’ self and artificial Other.<br />
Might Beckham’s extensions, like<br />
45
Amiens’ new face and Jackson’s new body (which includes a mass of platinum blonde hair),<br />
situate her beyond what Judith Butler has called ‘the limits of what we think we know’ 31 (Butler,<br />
2004:74): past normative intelligibility that distinguishes between dualisms that are used <strong>to</strong><br />
explain our bodies <strong>to</strong> ourselves? Is Amiens, with the nose, mouth, cheeks and chin of another<br />
woman (after having her own ravaged by a dog), comparable with Beckham? Indeed, Beckham’s<br />
body, like Amiens’, and <strong>to</strong> some extent Jackson’s, is dependent upon a fluid, ‘disassembl[ing]<br />
and reassemb[ling]…collective and personal self’, the hallmark of a cyborg-like figure, 32 ever<br />
wary of holism (Haraway, 2004:9-10, 23) All three women have in different ways positioned<br />
themselves in their own discourses that fall outside the perimeters of bodily integrity, past an<br />
au<strong>to</strong>nomous identity that is supposed <strong>to</strong> inaugurate one’s humanness and subvert monstrosity.<br />
Perhaps the consumers of human hair extensions explode essentialised definitions of womanhood<br />
through what Rosi Braidotti calls the ‘commodification of the monster’ (Braidotti, 1994:92).<br />
Put differently, through buying and wearing other women’s hair, one’s body might become<br />
an ambiguous object of display on<strong>to</strong> which is grafted the image of ‘woman’ as well as that of<br />
the monstrous: ‘a bodily entity that is anomalous…vis-à-vis the norm…[that is] mixed, in-<br />
between’ (1994:81).<br />
It is <strong>to</strong> corporealities like those of Amiens and Jackson that one can look for this<br />
sense of rebellious flesh, their bodies radically altered either literally <strong>to</strong> ‘save face’ or <strong>to</strong> create<br />
an entirely new one. Rather than simply reading bodies gone <strong>to</strong> such physical extremes as<br />
contributing <strong>to</strong> a patriarchal status quo that values certain kinds of femininity over others,<br />
I wonder what can be learned by critically considering how they transgress physical and<br />
ideological boundaries. How might Jackson, in her bodily emulation of the Barbie Doll, the<br />
very icon (for many) of sexist oppression, also simultaneously subvert it? Might her Barbie<br />
body parody the ‘perfect’ pink con<strong>to</strong>urs of this feminised figurine? Although crafting hair-<br />
extended bodies involved far less physical risk<br />
than radical forms of plastic surgery, they might, in<br />
their own monstrous excesses, also contribute <strong>to</strong> a<br />
democratisation of beauty by making it accessible<br />
<strong>to</strong> women who inhabit bodily boundaries. By<br />
engaging with Beckham as a woman who,<br />
knowingly or unknowingly ‘reorient[es] the<br />
proliferation of monsters by representing their<br />
existence’ (La<strong>to</strong>ur, 1993:12) through her hair<br />
and its styling, it becomes plausible <strong>to</strong> seriously<br />
reconsider her subject position as shifting<br />
Figure 27: Cindy Jackson (2006)<br />
46
from ‘Babs’ <strong>to</strong> borderless. Furthermore, the ambiguity that Beckham embodies – an identity<br />
both restrictive (as explored in Chapters One and Three) and transgressive (a zombie<br />
body reanimating the blur between aberration and adoration, beauty and horror, proper<br />
and improper, self and Other, life and death) – reflects the liminal qualities of hair itself.<br />
With its infinite contradictions, however, it seems that hair cannot be contained<br />
‘happily’: not by the confines of the skin from which it extends; not in the works of artists like<br />
<strong>Pynor</strong> whose ghostly silhouettes of hair tell both of elegy and of living testimony. While some,<br />
like Braidotti assert that the monstrous is potentially romantic (Braidotti, 1994:81), when hair<br />
is monstrous, it can be threatening: it is mediated by death and atrophy, it continually splits<br />
and sheds. Moreover, <strong>to</strong> wear its extensions can invite horror rather than romance as one is<br />
literally dressed in the tissue of an unknown donor. As such, hair takes that which is exoticised<br />
for its hybridity, like Beckham’s ‘beauty’, and makes it dangerous, makes it politically suspect,<br />
makes it strange, indeed, makes it fail. <strong>The</strong>se ideas are discussed in the following chapter.<br />
It is worth noting the arguable difference between the sense of a happy hybridity that<br />
some consumers of hair extensions intimate they experience (for instance, Riddle, Speer,<br />
Giancroce and Beckham) versus the discourse of shame and even humour that appears <strong>to</strong><br />
surround the wearing of <strong>to</strong>upees. 33 <strong>From</strong> vocabulary associated with the <strong>to</strong>upee such as ‘rug’,<br />
‘carpet’ and ‘road-kill’, <strong>to</strong> public figures like Donald Trump (figure 28) who is frequently<br />
the subject of <strong>to</strong>upee jokes made at his expense in the media, <strong>to</strong> Australia’s leading hair-loss<br />
treatment company, Ashley<br />
& Martin’s ‘RealGROWTH’<br />
rhe<strong>to</strong>ric, 34 it seems that the <strong>to</strong>upee has<br />
become its own taboo. <strong>The</strong> reproach<br />
at the appearance of the <strong>to</strong>upee<br />
wearer might in fact be an abject<br />
response <strong>to</strong> a zombie-commodity<br />
that <strong>to</strong>o obviously straddles its<br />
perceived ‘dead’ objecthood and<br />
the living body <strong>to</strong> which it is<br />
attached. Great Lengths extensions<br />
vanish seamlessly in<strong>to</strong> the hair of<br />
their wearers and thus seem part of<br />
the living body: they are washed,<br />
Figure 28: Donald Trump on the Larry King Show<br />
fingered through, knotted up in the consumer’s own strands. Toupees, however, are a striking reminder<br />
of blurred boundaries as artifice (the hairpiece) literally (and in many cases visibly) sits on <strong>to</strong>p of<br />
naked ‘authenticity’ (the bald head un<strong>to</strong>uched by hair-loss remedies). One can read the <strong>to</strong>upee as<br />
being a hairier incarnation of Kristeva’s earlier analogy vis-à-vis warm milk’s coagulated surface.<br />
47
Chapter 2:<br />
Lifeless Living Locks: <strong>The</strong> Zombie Commodity<br />
1 <strong>The</strong> fantasy of an au<strong>to</strong>nomous selfhood that persists in the West might be attributed <strong>to</strong> what, in ‘Private<br />
Parts: Body Organs in Global Trade’, John Frow suggests is a neo-Kantian tradition that values corporeal<br />
entirety; this is a tradition that seeks <strong>to</strong> res<strong>to</strong>re the perceived integrity of a fractured body (Frow, 1995:93,<br />
97).<br />
2 In an informal email received from contemporary Australian artist <strong>Helen</strong> <strong>Pynor</strong>, I was <strong>to</strong>ld that the<br />
polarities she is interested in exploring with regards <strong>to</strong> hair’s liminality are: life and death, past and<br />
present, memory and imagination, subject and object, self and Other, nature and culture (<strong>Pynor</strong>, 2006,<br />
pers. comm.).<br />
3 <strong>Pynor</strong> bought the hair for the artworks that appeared in her exhibition Breathing Shadows (2006)<br />
from a ‘hair dealer’ in London who, according <strong>to</strong> the artist, ‘is known for supplying very high-quality<br />
hair for wig-makers and <strong>to</strong> the film and theatre industries…[He] sells hair <strong>to</strong> cus<strong>to</strong>mers all over the<br />
world, including, apparently, Opera Australia…[I]t certainly wasn’t cheap…[He] buys his hair mainly<br />
from women in Spain, Eastern Europe, India and China. He explained <strong>to</strong> me that he used <strong>to</strong> also buy<br />
hair from Italy but as the economy of Italy developed more, there was no longer a market; presumably<br />
Italian women had better options. He also explained that hair from Spanish women was the best quality<br />
(closely followed by Eastern European women), he thought because of extra oil in their diet. On the<br />
other hand Indian and Chinese hair was drier...For me it was very important for my process <strong>to</strong> have<br />
very long lengths of hair (<strong>to</strong> save masses of time in the hair knotting process, <strong>to</strong> make the yarn) and<br />
also strong, good quality hair that wouldn’t break easily as I knitted it’ (<strong>Pynor</strong>, 2006, pers. comm.). It is<br />
important <strong>to</strong> be aware that the global trade in human hair amassed from countries such as India and other<br />
countries in Eastern Europe, reaches beyond a market for commercial hair extensions. In this context,<br />
transnationalised tresses are incorporated in<strong>to</strong> the world of contemporary High art. Here, it is critical <strong>to</strong><br />
ask: Does using transnationalised hair for art rather than for cosmetic purposes change the ethics of its<br />
consumption? When it appears as a conspicuous ‘material’ in a work of art as opposed <strong>to</strong> its seamless<br />
incorporation in<strong>to</strong> Western scalps, do the bodies of its ‘donors’ also become more apparent or do they<br />
remain entangled in a politics of invisibility?<br />
4 In ‘Abjection Overruled’ Martin Jay points out that ‘[t]he themes of abjection have become…<br />
commonplace in our culture…“For all its local insights,” Michael André Bernstein warns, “the sweep<br />
of Kristeva’s account elides its specificity, so that her abject is hypostasised, functioning as a global<br />
concept…” <strong>The</strong>re is [also] a danger in…creating some new value hierarchy on the ruins of the old…<br />
[<strong>The</strong>] one-sided exaltation of the abject as a liberating antidote <strong>to</strong> the repressive subject…[and] the<br />
increasingly sterile dicho<strong>to</strong>my that pits order against subversion [and] law against transgression…must<br />
now also be questioned’ (Jay, 1998:151, 154, 155, 156).<br />
5 In <strong>The</strong> Location of Culture, Bhabha refers <strong>to</strong> hybridity as emphasising ‘incommensurable elements…<br />
as the basis of cultural identifications. [Thus], what is at issue is the performative nature of differential<br />
identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, ‘opening out’,<br />
remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim <strong>to</strong> a singular or au<strong>to</strong>nomous sign of difference<br />
– be it class, gender, or race…[D]ifference is neither One nor the Other nut something else besides, in<br />
between (Bhabha, 1994:219, italics in original). For Bhabha, like a stairwell, hybridity is a liminal space,<br />
‘the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white. <strong>The</strong> hither<br />
and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either<br />
end of it from settling in<strong>to</strong> primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications<br />
opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed<br />
hierarchy’ (1994:4).<br />
6 In ‘Culture’s In Between’, Bhabha writes that ‘[a]t the point at which the precept attempts <strong>to</strong> objectify<br />
itself as a generalised knowledge or a normalising, hegemonic practice, the hybrid strategy or discourse<br />
opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation may be equivocal’ (Bhabha,<br />
1998:34, italics in original).<br />
7 In ‘A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination’, Jenny Sharpe<br />
refers <strong>to</strong> the ‘upper-class female hybrid’ as being the problem of contemporary international feminism<br />
because it ‘she’ used as a model for the gender training of poor rural women (Sharpe qtd. in Spivak,<br />
74
16 Georg Lukács asserts that, within a Marxian framework, the basis of ‘commodity-structure’ revolves<br />
around the ‘relation between people tak[ing] on the character of a thing and thus acquir[ing] a “phan<strong>to</strong>m<br />
objectivity”, an au<strong>to</strong>nomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing’ that it masks its relationship<br />
<strong>to</strong> the subject from which it originally comes…<strong>The</strong> transformation of the commodity relation in<strong>to</strong> a thing<br />
of “ghostly objectivity” cannot…content itself with the reduction of all objects for the gratification of<br />
human needs <strong>to</strong> commodities. It stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities<br />
and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can “own” or<br />
“dispose of” like the various objects of the external world’ (Lukács, 1968:83, 100).<br />
17 In ‘Hair’, Chris<strong>to</strong>pher R. Hallpike notes that, for many cultures, hair helps <strong>to</strong> maintain a relationship<br />
with the dead by being ‘placed with [a] corpse or on [a] <strong>to</strong>mb. In Islamic society, boys who had been<br />
dedicated <strong>to</strong> a saint at birth had their heads shaved at sometime between eight and twelve years of age,<br />
and their hair was placed on the saint’s <strong>to</strong>mb. Conversely, among the Iroquois [Native American peoples],<br />
a lock of hair from the dead was given <strong>to</strong> the nearest relative of the deceased, while the Zuni believed that<br />
<strong>to</strong> burn the hair of a deceased friend and inhale the smoke would produce good health. Among Arabs, the<br />
hair or beard is regarded as the seat of vitality and thus is specially suited <strong>to</strong> serve as the substitute for a<br />
life’ (Hallpike, 1987:156-157).<br />
18 <strong>Pynor</strong> notes that throughout the process of creating her work Exhale (2006) she considered the<br />
experience of time, life and death (<strong>Pynor</strong>, 2006, pers. comm.). She remembers the following: ‘[d]uring<br />
the process of making Exhale my father died, and this added another resonance <strong>to</strong> the work for me. I have<br />
only just recently named this work Exhale but I am making the connection now…that my father actually<br />
died of collapsed lungs, a complication after heart surgery’ (2006, pers. comm., italics added). If, for<br />
<strong>Pynor</strong>, Exhale did involve a process of mourning, it is interesting that it would be mediated by the use of<br />
cut hair because, as Hallpike observes, ‘the cutting or tearing out of hair in mourning is one of the most<br />
commonly reported uses of hair’ (Hallpike, 1987:157). Thus, whether the subject (in this case specifically<br />
the artist) is or is not aware, hair, death and mourning can be inexorably intertwined.<br />
19 Due <strong>to</strong> the scope of this research I cannot examine in detail the way in which in British artist <strong>Helen</strong><br />
Chadwick’s piece Loop my Loop (1991) not only does the bodily interior mix and merge with the bodily<br />
exterior, but beauty and horror are, arguably, made manifest in the fragile boundaries between expiring<br />
soft tissue and hair that, despite its being cut away from the scalp, persists. Chadwick’s piece, <strong>to</strong>tem-like,<br />
might conjure up an abject response from its viewers because it underscores ‘the impossible but necessary<br />
transcendence of the subject’s corporeality, and the impure, defiling elements of its uncontrollable<br />
materiality’ (Grosz, 1990:87-88).<br />
20 Also due <strong>to</strong> the scope of this research I am unable <strong>to</strong> explore Painting with Asian Blonde (2002) in<br />
any great detail. A brief description is, however, worth noting: using butterfly clips, on a large white<br />
wall, Finnish artist <strong>Helen</strong>a Hietanen has mounted hair imported from Asia by the European wig-making<br />
and extensions industry (Hietanen, 2006, pers. comm.). According <strong>to</strong> Apinan Poshyananda in ‘Paradise<br />
Regained: Beyond Paradise, Nordic Artists Travel East’, the installation is covered in strands dyed<br />
various shades of blonde, some fake and some real <strong>to</strong> create a new space of exotica and superficiality<br />
(Poshyananda, 2002). Moreover, in this piece, Hietanen ‘conjures up the idea of blonde infatuation…<br />
comment[ing] on Asian youth culture, with its obsession with dyed blonde hair, coloured contact lenses<br />
and white skin’ (2002). Although in this installation Hietanen is not commenting directly on the global<br />
hair trade per se, this particular piece is seminal <strong>to</strong> exploring transnationalised hair because it uses it as its<br />
raw material, thus confronting its specta<strong>to</strong>rs with a body of foreign follicles used <strong>to</strong> enhance and extend<br />
the bodies of many Western consumers. Like Meret Oppenheim’s Fur Teacup (1936), also discussed in<br />
this chapter, Hietanen’s piece takes repulsion at a hair in one’s soup <strong>to</strong> the next level by confronting the<br />
viewer with the horror of hair appearing where it does not ordinarily belong: in her work, from a human<br />
head <strong>to</strong> a gallery installation. Mostly bleached, Hietanen’s raw material has been stripped of its biology<br />
and made artificial; it has been removed from the flesh and made in<strong>to</strong> art; it seems both lifeless and<br />
living as its hair quivers, creating shimmering shadows on its surface (2002). In further research I would<br />
like <strong>to</strong> explore the ways in which Painting with Asian Blonde deliberately provokes questions about the<br />
politics of abjection and transnationalised body parts. Here, art is seemingly more able <strong>to</strong> blur the very<br />
boundaries of such a politics than, for example, popular culture.<br />
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